“Oh gods! Oh dragons! Get them back into the wagon, quickly!” Agetta wasn’t talking to her. She wasn’t sure she could have responded if she was.

  Runa was vaguely aware of Annek throwing something into the wagon’s dark interior, and the spiders skittering after it. White cave spiders, she thought absently. They were everywhere in the Cauldron. And in the caves up north. Not usually so big, though.

  Unless you kept them well fed.

  Kids kept them as pets, sometimes. Not in the Cauldron. Up north.

  She swayed slightly.

  “That’s all of them?” Agetta swore again, in relief.

  “They were asleep when I checked on them!” her daughter protested.

  “Then what riled them up so much?”

  “I don’t know!”

  Runa took a shaky breath. Severine was shouting at her from somewhere far away. The other end of the square, she assumed. Where she’d left her. Where they’d been standing together only a few seconds before, laughing about how fussy Junilla was being over the bottles compared to how she’d all but thrown barrels of her own brew at people.

  Then she’d heard the scream.

  And somehow, without her even noticing she was doing it, she had pulled Bloodburster from Severine’s pack and sprinted across the square with it.

  That… didn’t feel like a good thing to happen.

  She gave the sword a wide berth. It was still trembling with the force she’d thrust it into the ground with.

  Why was it in your pack? she wanted to ask Severine, but Severine wasn’t here and she would have screamed it, not asked it, so it was a good thing she wasn’t here, and instead she asked, “Why do you have cave spiders in your wagon?”

  Her voice barely even shook.

  Agetta gnawed on her bottom lip. “To guard the silverweave. Hush. I need to listen.”

  She pressed her ear against the side of the wagon.

  Runa flicked a glance at Annek. “No one’s in danger?” she asked in an undertone.

  “She’s going to kill me three times, and then put a brain slug in my head so she can kill me again,” Annek moaned. “But they were fine! I didn’t disturb them. They—”

  “Shh!”

  Annek shh’d.

  “They’re eating,” Agetta determined, worry etched into her features. “That’s good. If they all calm down, if they stay in there instead of trying to… oh gods, what is that?”

  She fell to her knees in front of a lumpy shadow half-hidden behind one of the wagon’s wheels. For one horrible moment, Runa thought she had killed one of the spiders, after all.

  It was almost worse.

  “No…” Agetta moaned. She lifted the scrap of fabric as though it might disintegrate in her hands.

  It was a cool grey. Not the shimmering riot of the aurora, or the milky reflection of the winter’s lights on dragonscale. Just… grey.

  “Isn’t that some of the spiderweb we wrapped around the silverweave, to keep it safe from the sky?” Annek asked hopefully.

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  The mood dimmed. Runa felt more out of place than ever. Nobody wanted an audience while their life’s work collapsed in front of their eyes.

  “I don’t understand! They’ve been fine the whole journey. Even after the eggs hatched!”

  Ah, thought Runa. “How many spiders do you have in there?”

  Mother and daughter shot her a distracted look, which she probably deserved for interrupting.

  Runa cleared her throat. “If it’s, uh. If it’s more than nine, they probably tried to split the nest.”

  The two trollish women stared at her. “What? I’ve never heard of anything like that!” Agetta snapped.

  “It’s the legs. Cave spiders can’t have more spiders in a nest than any one spider has legs. That’s how they number off how many of them there are, like we count on fingers, and if they run out of legs before they run out of spiders, they think they’re under attack.”

  Annek’s eyes widened. “You’ve kept cave spiders?”

  Runa shrugged, which was more diplomatic than saying Actually, I spent half a year trying to get through a cave system full of cursed, mutated versions of your little creepy-crawlies, so I got to know them real well when we weren’t spewing venom or hacking at each other with axes.

  “Kinda,” she said out loud.

  “We’ve never traveled with a nest this big before.” Agetta rubbed her tusks distractedly. “Last year, we only had three, and it worked so well we thought this year we could scale up…” Her face paled, the dawn pink fading to rose-petal. “And now we’ve lost everything.”

  “No, Ma, that’s not all the silverweave. Look, it’s only a scrap. The rest of it might be okay.”

  Runa’s mouth was still talking. “They split whatever’s in their nests, too. Usually that’s food rather than fabric, but I guess the same rule applies.”

  Annek darted towards the wagon. “I’ll check—”

  “No!” Runa and Agetta yelled at the same time.

  “Not while they’re eating!” Agetta hissed.

  “Not while they’re splitting their nest,” Runa added. “They get antsy.”

  “They won’t hurt me.” Annek rolled her eyes. “I raised them all from eggs.”

  “Right, so they probably already know how tasty you are,” Runa retorted. “I’ll go in.”

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “No, no.” Agetta flapped her hands. “No, we can’t trouble you.”

  “It’s no trouble. This is what you—” hired me for. She stopped herself before the familiar words made it out of her mouth.

  Not that people usually tried to convince her out of leading the way into the spider-infested caves, or whatever.

  “This is what I’m good at,” she amended awkwardly.

  Behind her, the sword hummed.

  “They’ll be fractious, with wanting to split the nest, and feeding time. I know how to deal with that. I’ll check that the fabric’s safe. You said they wrap it in spidersilk? Then all I need to do is make sure none’s showing through the silk, right?”

  Agetta and Annek exchanged a look.

  And then—

  “You’ll have to do it in full darkness,” Agetta warned her, which was as good as a yes.

  Severine, Tam and Errant had joined them by now, which meant Runa was the one who had an audience as she carefully pulled aside the heavy canvas flysheet that covered the wagon. There was a second door behind it, which Runa didn’t open until the flysheet was carefully tied down again, letting no glimpse of sky or sunlight in.

  She eased the door open.

  Agetta clearly ran a tight ship. The hinges didn’t even creak.

  Runa slipped inside, and closed the door behind her.

  It took her eyes a few minutes to adjust to the darkness. The wagon was sealed as tight as the jar of butter Nobody in Particular had rolled over to her that morning. No light was getting in from outside.

  But cave spiders made their own light.

  Not much. But enough to smudge the darkness, at first, and then as her eyes clung to the only illumination they could find, little gaps appeared in the shadows. The segmented line of a leg. The whisper of web. The glint of pink eyes, reflecting a light that barely existed.

  She made out the shape of the wagon’s inside and its contents by inference. Anywhere the not-quite-light wasn’t, must be something else. Rolls of fabric strapped to the walls. Chests bolted to the floor, doing double duty as tables and chairs. The wagon was troll-sized, and gods and liches, wasn’t that a relief. She wouldn’t want to do this in a vehicle made for dwarfs, that was for damned sure.

  She moved slowly, carefully. The shadows seemed to stop sooner than they should, and she soon found out why. A wall separated this half of the wagon from another room at the back—where the spiders and their precious cargo had been stored, she guessed. They must have burst out here into the living space when they did a leg-count and realized there were too many.

  The spiders out here hadn’t settled on a new nest site yet. They were spinning to explore, lining the room with softly shining silver. Eventually they would choose a likely-looking piece of food or treasure and spin it into the heart of a new nest.

  The fact that there were half a dozen people outside who knew she was in here probably meant she wasn’t going to end up the lump inside that heart.

  She counted, as best she could in the dark. There must have been at least nine spiders to start with. Nests usually split down the middle, ish, so if she could locate them all—one, two, three—that not-quite-a-shadow might be a fourth…

  Five.

  She stopped breathing, and moved.

  A cave spider wouldn’t kill you. Troll kids kept them as pets. But five cave spiders could dole out a lot of pain that wasn’t death, and it had been long enough since one bit her that Runa would probably be dopy for days after.

  Anyway, the poor things were freaked out of their tiny minds. If she barged in thoughtlessly, she’d only make their day worse.

  So she picked her way carefully between the shining threads hanging from the ceiling. When the spiders trembled, sensing an invader, she tapped their legs, pretending to be another spider. They only counted by eights. Five spiders plus Runa didn’t register with them as something wrong.

  Tap, tap. Tap, tap. She made it to the second compartment.

  She opened the door.

  A sliver of aurora filled the room.

  Shit.

  Five more spiders. No, six. Agetta and her daughter had been lucky the nest only split now. Four of them were spinning something lumpy in the corner—packing up their dinner leftovers, Runa guessed. The other two were waiting, watching, as Runa closed the door behind herself.

  Ribbons of blue, green and purple light wafted over them, drifting from the aurora trapped in silk.

  Runa thought of Agetta and her daughter’s faces when they thought the silverweave was lost. They had other wares, but the silverweave was clearly what they’d built their entire business on, the same way these spiders built their nests around their treasure pantry. Without it, they wouldn’t just be out the money from selling it to wealthy trolls on Torpor Peak. They’d lose their reputation as well.

  Not if Runa could help it.

  The spiders weren’t weaving over the gap in the spidersilk where their ex-nestmates had torn free a strip of their nest heart. Strange. Maybe they needed a little encouragement.

  Avoiding the dangling strings that had been left out to catch the spiders’ next meal, Runa knelt next to the torn silverweave. The bundle was large; as big as some of the fabric rolls outside, and not all of that could be spidersilk. There must be enough silverweave left in there to make Agetta’s journey worthwhile.

  But the spiders were ignoring it.

  She reached out.

  It had been years since she touched silverweave. She still remembered the sensation of it falling over her body: gentle as air, like wearing the lick of warmth as you step into the light of a fire.

  It was as soft as she remembered.

  A chittering rose up around her. A spider appeared in her peripheral vision, then two. Web shot out, a sticky thread of silver that coated the fabric where Runa had brushed it.

  Good.

  More spiders skittered down to defend their prize. Runa ran her finger along the exposed piece of silverweave until it was completely covered in fresh spidersilk. She kept poking the spot with one fingernail, making sure the silk was laid on so thick that not a hint of aurora light showed through.

  Okay. This next bit was going to be tricky.

  The spiders—five, she counted them—checked over their silk bundle. Runa rose slowly, tapping legs as she went—hello, it’s me, another one of your up-to-eight-and-no-more nestmates—and crept backwards towards the door.

  Too slow.

  The spiders advanced in one massive, skittering group, which completely distracted her from the surprise seventh spider dangling from the ceiling. It landed on her head as she tiptoed backwards through the door and she swiped it away, which meant it bit her arm, not her face.

  She swore and stumbled through the first room. The two packs of spiders hissed at each other, some scrambling up Runa’s legs to get a better vantage point, and she had a brief vision of ending up like the silverweave: engulfed in spidersilk and torn in two to share between the now-feuding nests.

  Her arm throbbed. She lurched half-through the door again and closed it on herself, scraping half the spiders back into their own compartment and slamming the door before they could dart through again. That only left… oof…

  A wave of dizziness struck her. How many spiders were in this first room? She shook one off her arm and another one took its place. Cave spider venom by itself wasn’t deadly. It was the way it made you lie down in one place for long enough for the spiders to wrap you up that was the problem. But…

  “Runa! Are you okay? What was that noise?” Severine called from outside.

  Okay. Don’t let Severine in here. That was a clear, solid thought. “Don’t come in!” Runa shouted.

  She kicked off another spider—ouch—as Severine yelled back, “I’m coming in!”

  Stupid spiders. She was trying to not kill them, and this was what she got?

  Well, she knew one thing spiders hated.

  Runa checked over her shoulder. The door to the silverweave room was closed. She slammed open the external door, flung the canvas cover open, and…

  It was dark.

  While she’d been wrangling spiders, the sun had finished going down.

  And while torches were enough to make cave spiders’ eyes glitter fiercely, she knew from long experience that they weren’t enough to make them scuttle away in fear.

  A crowd stared up at her. Agetta and her daughter. Tam and Errant. Severine. A whole lot of people she didn’t know.

  Even Errant’s mule was staring.

  And she was covered in spiders.

  “Uh,” Runa said, to all those staring faces.

  Another one of the spiders bit her.

  “Ouch.”

  “Hiss!” said the spiders, as though she wasn’t supposed to complain about the biting, or something.

  Was the venom getting to her already? It had to be, because it looked like the pack on Severine’s back was glowing.

  Severine yelped like she was the one getting bit. She shrugged the pack off and unclasped it in one swift movement. The space where Bloodburster was no longer strapped into the pack seemed to throb in Runa’s vision, and then a knife with a thin, curved blade leapt into Severine’s hand.

  She held it unsteadily.

  It glowed effervescent blue.

  All the spiders clinging to Runa shrieked and, as one, swarmed off her like a many-legged blanket and disappeared back into the wagon.

  Runa swayed. She shut the wagon door. Then, with slightly more difficulty, she buffeted the canvas cover flat behind her.

  “Silverweave’s fine,” she informed Agetta, trying not to slur her words. “Spider’s’ve taken over both rooms, though. Not in the best moods.”

  “That’s wonderful, but … Are you all right?”

  She scoffed. At least, she made a sort of a noise, out of her throat, before the next words made their way out. “Errant? Can you bring that cart over here?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “I’m gonna fall in it.”